Diablo III Launch = Technical Disaster?

Posted By: May 16, 2012

Though I personally didn’t have too much trouble playing when the servers first went up yesterday, if you go by the gaming media’s coverage of Diablo III’s launch, it was a complete disaster. Dozens of articles on every sort of gaming and tech site stress the technical problems, the inability to log in or create characters, the disconnects, and the server outages.

Seriously, look at Google News for “Diablo 3 launch” and easily two-thirds of the articles make it sound like some sort of Titanic Hindenburg crashed into a sky iceberg. Some quotes and links to give you a sense of the amount of angry headlines:

Gaming Bolt — Diablo 3 fiasco: People have to take a stand against always-online DRM

From this I have to think the general fan’s opinion of D3’s launch is that it was a disaster. Was that how things went for you guys? As bad as these media stories make it sound?

For me, Diablo III’s launch wasn’t bad. Thanks to delays from ending our live launch show and getting my computer set up to livestream the playthrough, I wasn’t able to log onto the EU server until about an hour after it went live. When I finally did, it took a few minutes of trying, but I was able to get in, create a Wizard, and create a game fairly easily. It took Elly a good fifteen minutes to get logged on as well, but once she was in we played together in the same game for a good five hours straight. The game was actually more stable than our computers, as I had two hard crashes and she had one, while the same game remained online the entire time.

I didn’t try to log onto the US servers at midnight, but the players I’ve talked to said logging in was impossible for half an hour or so, but after that things went pretty well. The Asian servers were online hours earlier and weren’t great, but mostly held up, from reports I’ve read.

So why is the online news coverage so negative? Did a lot of journos try at 12:05, get realm unavailable messages, and /ragequit?

Remember last year after the online-only “feature” was announced and got a lot of bad press, yet most of you guys were supportive of it and insisted (as did Blizzard) that everyone had a good internet connection by now, that Blizzard knew how to run game servers with at least 24/7 (or at least 23.8/7) uptime, that people who wanted single player mode were just pissed about losing out on piracy, etc. Anyone rethinking their opinion on that issue yet, or are you perfectly willing to suffer through a day or a week (or a month?) of repeated server inaccessibility for what you see as a greater good?

I could log in without a problem at 5pm on EU but then I had to cut it off (family) when I tried to log back at around 8:30 I wasn’t able to up until 10 o’clock. And after that I got no achivements and sometimes my whispers didn’t appear at the recipent.

So all in all, though the game is a blast I agree with the negative press on the technical issues. This could have been done much smoother especially on the second night.

I had a very different experience. Two British friends and I were trying to get onto the EU servers starting at about 6pm; it took us about two hours just to log, then about half that to get all three of us in the same game.

As Sangdrax said, once you got in it was fine. It was just a massive hassle to muscle our way in initially. Thankfully it went much smoother today. Let’s hope that our collective logging issues are over.

The game is a blast, so I can’t really bash. Sadly, I didn’t have much time to play and just now got out of the beta content, even though I was at the ready when the europe servers went live. Couldn’t get in, etc, had to go to work, come back from work, same thing..sadface.. I have a total of 4 hours playtime I think, but.. I guess I don’t mind that much YET as I have a lot of other things to take care of. If this was a weekend or if I managed to get a week off and this happened, yea, I’d be outraged.

I’m hoping for smooth sailing when the weekend hits. If not, then I’ll rage. =P

Since I work in the IT industry I’m kind of used to these kinds of things and also used to the customers’ reactions to these kinds of things.

Common sense pretty much tells you that if you’ve been X months/years developing something then there’s no excuse for failing on launch day but it’s very very hard to come up with tests that simulate what real people do once they get their hands on a system. You can’t simulate in a realistic way 5 million people trying to log in at the exact same minute on launch day.

Honestly I think the launch went pretty well, since I have (unfortunately) seen first hand some horror stories on launch day for systems that are way more critical than a video game is.

But how is that still possible in this day and age?
Technology evolves, but it seems there are always issues with networks that have huge work loads. I don’t get it.
If you look at the making of software: IDE’s get better, API’s get better, etc. Technology to make software advances, but I don’t feel it’s the same for the network aspect: server hardware improves, backbone improves, … but it seems this all isn’t sufficient enough?
Microsoft also had issues in the past with the release of their publicly available Windows Vista betas. But with the release of Windows 7 Betas and Windows 8 CP all went well!
Blizzard really failed in my eyes… Glad I didnt buy the game yet (no time) or I would be disappointed.

(I’m studying for Software Engineer but I haven’t had yet any really network related course, so I’m new to this.)

common sense & economics, i’d say.
how many servers do you buy and keep running?
enough for everybody, of course.

and what is enough? not a simultaneous multi-region launch ‘enough’ of course.
imagine your capacities are to support 100k people for the login servers (SIMULTANEOUSLY).
now imagine what happens when 1.5m fans basically DDOS the servers at 12:01 ?

now server stress will be much more streamlined and less peaked than at launch time.
and for me D3s server hold up well very well so far. (and i DESPISE D3 being online only)

so, i would start to worry if problems persisted for more than 12 hours*. which would indicate serious hard- and/or software issues or misplanning.

I think it’s mostly about money. Bliz could buy enough servers and redundancy on realms and log ins to support everyone playing at once. They’d be fine if the limited sales and ramped up the servers with more testers added over time, as companies do during beta tests. But consumers would never tolerate that, as we’ve become used to simultaneous world wide launches. Look how much complaining people did about having to wait just 8 or 10 hours longer, between Asia / EU/ US servers?

They have 10m people playing Wow by spreading it over thousands of servers. Of course all those people don’t log onto WoW at once or it would kill the system. That’s what happens when D3 launches. Tthere’s a higher concurrency than there will ever be again. Could Bliz provide enough hardware to deal with the launch rush? Probably. Would that be very expensive to scale up to a capacity that would be a lot of wasted space ever after? Yes.

So I think they sort of resign themselves to a lot of crush issues and bad press at launch, figuring that’s just the cost of doing business, and is a cheaper cost than doubling the server capacity over what they’ll need after this week.

Flux (and the others), in the end of all things, technology evolves but Physics is still Physics. 🙂
Everything has its limitations and networks are no exception, it doesn’t matter how much redundancy you put into it, there’s always a limit to be broken (bandwidth is finite).

Sure we can extrapolate on what that limit may be and try and provide stability up to that point but:

1 – is it really interesting (economically) to invest in having system stability for 9 million simultaneous logins that will only occur once in a while (release day, new expansion, important content patches, …) and then will become redundant since half the hardware used will probably due for 99% of the time?
2 – have we extrapolated well enough how many people will try to login on release day?

I’m guessing for Blizzard #2 is pretty easy to calculate, as it is for us to know how many people maximum will use our software. When we launch new versions though we still limit access to handful of users (and it really is a handful) before we let hundreds/thousands in and even then we have a clear knowledge of how many maximum users will there ever be – still the system doesn’t hold up if they all did login at the same time, something that never happens 99% of the time.

Honestly I don’t see anything wrong with what happened. Maybe Blizzard should have let people in in batches instead of opening up the floodgates at 23h59 but that would probably be worse because then people would think it’s unfair for some to have earlier access, even if by 30 minutes. I was expecting the downtime and I was expecting everything to be working properly a few hours in as it seems to be (I still haven’t played since Amazon decided I don’t deserve to receive the game until Friday so maybe I’m being fooled by the torrent of live streams and youtube videos).

^^^^^These were literally my exact words to all my friends… why buy the servers before you have the money? wait til you know you have X players and adjust… besides, they already had our money at that point.

You also have to understand the people that Blizzard caters to….gamers. For the most part, gamers are immature, childish, impatient etc, etc..and they absolute know that the problems that they are having are not going to do much to curb people buying their games. It’s a fact. When the RROD was happening to 360’s, there was a failure rate of over 50% for ALL CONSOLES SOLD. 50%!?! What company do you know can have a failure rate that high, and STILL sell their product and/or not go out of business? Because gamers have the memory of a rock, Microsoft knew that this would cost them money, but customers would STILL come back for more.

Journalists _wants_ it to be a fail, because it would make a good story. “Modern” journalism (sadly) isn’t about telling you what actually happened, it’s about choosing an angle for any given story, and presenting it. Sometimes the same f***ing journalist covers different angles to the same story in different articles! It’s gotten to the point where “artistic writing” and getting the most interesting angle, is more important than the actual content of the story.

I had issues with my install, which was my own fault, and had to spend the first few hours re-downloading and re-installing. So I didn’t experience the first two hours first-hand. After that though, I haven’t had any issues at all. I’m sure there are lots of people outthere who actually have problems, and I feel bad for them, but calling it a disaster after two days, is an outright lie.

Journalists are not being sensationalists in any way. If you launch a game and because of a stupid feature (online only) many players are unable to play after waiting so much time then its a really bad sign, especially because many players struggled to find some spare hours to play because they have a busy life and can’t just keep playing every time they want.
The game won’t fail because of this problem, but it already showed one wrongly move made by Blizzard after they removed single player. If players could play the game offline I’m sure many would be perfectly fine by not being able to connect right now.

Let me steal my own post to say something else. Didn’t you guys find REALLY odd that there’s a single server for the whole North America, Latin America, Australia/NZ and Southeast Asia? I can only see one reason for Blizzard to include so many people in the same region, and that’s because the RMAH (a giant single RMAH brings more money than a few smaller ones).
As always, money is more important for Blizzard than the quality of their services. No wonder why there are so many issues in log in process with so many players in the same server.

I haven’t received my copy yet either, but it should arrive today. It’s sad that we’ve had such a rough start with Diablo, but also understandable due to the massive interest players have in the game. On one hand, I wouldn’t have minded getting my copy of the game at the same time as when the servers went live, but at the same time, I’m kind of glad I’ll be a couple of days late. Hopefully, the majority of the biggest problems will have been sorted out by then.

the log-in problems have been significant…ppl are raging…, i think the source of the negative sentiment is that Blizz has publicized heavily the midnight launch rather than being: ok guys shit might happen so keep it cool, and just log two days after release;)

Same here (EU). No problem whatsoever for me and my 12 playing pals.
I’m sure problems do occur for many people, though much like DMB I find it not surprising at all and wouldn’t call it a disaster for such an infrastructure given the circumstances. Back to HC.

Well it take a little patience and repeating CTRL+V+ENTER trick to log in, but when You in its a blast, i played 3 hours with friend and it was quite difficult when chars are undergeared:)

I must say one thing, its probably only my imagination but after clicking “LOG IN’ button i instantly clicked ALT+TAB and game usually logged in in the background, even it was impossible (>30 attempts) in regular way. For me it even worked when i was logged in and couldn’t create new hero due to server stress, i clicked ‘Create” button and after minimalizing and waiting for a while hero was there.

As is say it unbelievable but i wouldn’t say impossible, but it works for me few times so i don’t bother if you believe me or not:P

Obviously a lot of people didn’t get on and aren’t happy. But I think you’ll find that people who had no tech problems and played happily are far less likely to post threads raging about the fact…

You know how many angry forum comments Elly, me, and the half dozen other people I know personally, who told me about their pretty good opening night tech experiences have posted? None. Since none of us had a “can’t connect” nightmare to motivate it.

Don’t confuse a noisy aggrieved minority with the CW of the majority. That sort of quandry underlies most of the votes I post on this site, since our anonymous votes that samples thousands of fans, provides a much more representative community cross-section than the forum posts and comments of people who have been motivated to complain by their own technical difficulties.

I first logged on about 5am EST (2 hours after launch in my region) and had no problems whatsoever, played about 2 hours it was fantastic. Then since I had to go to work I played on my laptop on the commuter train for an hour with a very spotty 3G connection and only got dropped from server twice in an hour under those circumstances. Often when I am using my phone 3G connection on the train websites barely even load at times so this really speaks volumes for the D3 server connection being pretty solid.

Same statement for me : one hour trying between 0h and 1h on the EU realm without success, then played until 6h.
The same day, played from 11h to 18h with no problem (immediate connection). Then impossible to connect at 20h-> bed immediately.

I think people who can connect are busy playing.
People who cannot connect, are busy complaining on the forums.
There are problems of connection for sure, it doesn’t concern everybody but the balance of positive versus negative comments you hear is necessarily biased.

[EDIT] I like the game but I’m against the online-only thing. I would like to play it in the trains, planes, country house…

– My install went along without a hitch.
-I couldn’t log in at 12:01 (5:01PM aussie time) due to server load
-I was able to log in an play roughly two hours later (mostly as I was having dinner. D3 is good but it’s not so good that I’m going to starve :))
-It was pretty laggy but I attribute that to players logging in at times when they generally wouldn’t play, and I live in Aus where there are no b.net servers.
– Am I dissapointed that there is no ‘off-line’ mode? Sure, but since I already knew there’s wasn’t one I wasn’t concerned.
– Was I surprised at the login issues? As I’ve been playing WoW since launch and have experienced their ‘first day issues’ for over seven years, no.
– Would it have been nice if there were no issues? Obviously yes, but until internet communications are 100% reliable I’ll stick with my own realistic expectations of ‘general chaos at launch but stabalising over the ensuring hours/days’.

All in all, D3 met all my expectations and while I’ve only played briefly past where beta ended, I’m having a blast and look forward to years of enjoyment, as I did with Diablo 2…

I love the game, there is *so much* to love about it. But no, the launch wasn’t good. I was ready to play for 24 hours straight on the US servers the second they went live. 18 hours later I’d been playing for 9. At one point the game was down for a full 4 hours *shrug* and it took 2 hours from launch to be able to login at all.

The launch has been a really poor showing from Blizzard, I don’t have a problem with Online only it if combats piracy and keeps the hackers away but if your going to make that design choice (to save money on developing security software) then you have to put money on SERVER infastructure. Which obviously they didn’t do. They could have run Stress Tests and Betas for as long as they wanted (on the crappy beta content, which is another shame because the game is fantastic) and made sure there were zero problems at launch. They didn’t do it.

That’s on Blizzard. They deserve to get hammered for making such a bad first impression, but in a couple months no one will care and we will all be playing Diablo still so I guess w/e? Maybe that’s what Blizz were thinking too.

The launch day was pretty much of a fail. Issues arise and some have been addressed to be resolved and have been resolved. Still what is mostly missing, which Bashiok is doing though, is communicating more with the players and let them KNOW, that something is not working more beforehand.

Still Blizzard had a grand streak of launchdays beiing hindered by hickups. D3 kind of topped them all.

Still i really love this game and in a few days the issues will be resolved. Until then enjoy rest of life. There will be enough time to be hungry, tired and still playing in the future 😉

For the US server:
-I was able to log in exactly at 3:01am (or approximately at that time, I spent about 2 minutes before spamming my password so I got in before most people realized the server had switched on).
-So far I have experienced absolutely no lag outside of 2 minor rubberband issues, and those were only once each that lasted for about 5 seconds.
-I did have some rollback and achievement issues after I got back on today, but honestly, nothing of value was lost. I’ve made all of that up and more now and I barely even feel phased about the issue.
-Obviously, there have been server issues that have caused some annoyance, but nothing more than I already expected going into something like this. Give it a week and it will be running smoothly, at least for the most part.
All in all I think the media is blowing it hugely out of proportion, and so is a lot of the playerbase. They scream “we paid for a working product” and all that nonsense, and while I can certainly understand their frustration, this whole launch thing has been blown so far out of whack that it’s actually kind of funny. In a month nobody is even going to remember the problems with launch, and I consider this money well spent despite the hiccups.

I was having some problems too. when i first logged in it went smoothly but after an hour or two with my barb i had
some lags that really ruined the whole fighting experience. later on i got disconnected suddenly and couldnt log in for some time and when i finally DID log in, my barb was gone :(, wiped. i hope these things wont happen again cuz its really frustrating to lose a character.

I think people are too spoiled. Really it isn’t that hard to come in, wait… Maybe I’m just to lucky xD? Nah but I really think people are overeating, sure you might have to use a few mins to get in but I kinda think that was expected from the start. I’m just waiting for after this week when people will be going, D3 is awesome because awesome is awesome. Of course people are complaining, they want their problems to be magically solved, truth is some of my friends had a few problems one about downloading the client another about his battle tag. But their problems was easily solved when they patiently asked for help at the forums. the log in screen is a bit of a hell though I agree specially when work hours are over, and everyone is crowding the servers. (but really I doubt Blizzard could have done that much to solve this)

I disagree. I couldn’t log in for 22 hours. Is it too much to expect a smooth launch from a multi billion dollar company who has probably the best experience in the industry when it comes to handling game traffic?

People are becoming too jaded when it comes to service level expectations ‘I pay money for a service, it doesn’t work, oh well that happens’. These gaming companies are spoiled to have such understanding customers that will always keep coming back for more.

However, it is a great game (the 2 hours i played after pressing CTRL-V about 8000 times in 20+ hours)

I managed to get in the game after about an hour of trying on euro servers.

I think seeing an error box constantly popping up doesn’t help with the press/people getting upset etc. They should of implemented a queueing system. It’s not very 21st century having to constantly copy and paste you login details in every 5 mins.

Apart from not being happy there’s no offline mode in a single player type game I’m really enjoying Diablo 3 so far.

I agree about the queuing system. At least make our misery manageable to some degree. ‘You are number 712 in the queue’ ‘Ah, great, that’s ok! Lets go cook some dinner, instead of CTRL-V-ing for the next 3 hours…’

The thing is, this doesn’t happen with other commercial products or services. We’re paying money for it and it should work. I can understand a few bugs, but the product should be more functional than D3 has been so far.

It’s not about gamer entitlement, this comes down to consumer entitlement – if people are paying money for it, then it should work.

They’re the experts in their field and are making a lot of money off this, so it’s inexcusable. What would happen if Apple launched a new product, and it wasn’t functional on day 1? And all they can say ‘Sorry 🙂 we’re trying really hard :)’

What I’ve played of the game is great, but the service is unacceptable.

i manage to play for 5 hours with no logging in problem, from aussie. But the ping/latency issue got much worse. the ping was sitting in the 300-700 ms range the whole time, with occational jump to 1.2k above. I havent got time to visit the forum in D3 to see if everyone else experience the same, but from what i feel, it will be hell in inferno for me…….

Diablo 3 is no different from other Software. Software always has bugs, no matter how well it is tested. Problems like these happen with the best piece of software. It remains to be seen if these incidents keep occurring or if it was just a glitch.

So far at least you cannot really say if the game was released prematurely, not because of one incident, only the future will tell.

Well, launch would have been a fail for me IF I limited play hours available and those significantly overlapped with downtime, as happened to a couple of my friends.

Myself having taken a couple of days off, though, I have been arranging my sleep, eating, errands etc around uptime, and I’ve had plenty of good chunks of gameplay 🙂 Starting right after release, when having eventually logged on, I played without any issues (aside from missing achievement bugs) from 12:30 to 6:30 am (when I noticed the sun was up I figured I’d better get some sleep 😉 ).

Played again today around the two major downtimes on the US servers. Got a few more hours in.

And now I think I had better get some sleep, since I do have to be back on a normal schedule to work the rest of the week 😉

So TL;DR, it has not been a disaster for me personally; I got in a lot of play and really enjoyed it. Think it all depends on your individual scheduling constraints though.

Europe servers have problems right now, 2 disconnects in the last few minutes.

What I really dislike is the communication of Blizzard:
The server status page shows the servers up and running when they are surely not.
And why the hell do I have to read twitter to get information about whats going on, why can’t Blizzard put a few lines of text on their server status page.

The whole launch is quite embarrassing for Blizzard. They knew almost exactly how many people had bought the game, they knew the huge interest (if only from the open beta) and yet (at least here in Europe) it was almost impossible to log on.
I tried logging in around midnight for about an hour, no chance. So I went to bed. In the morning I tried logging in created a character and started a game for 1 minute before going to work. In the evening I tried logging in to finally really play, no chance. So I tried for a few hours later and I managed to log in, only to be stuck for half an hour on a retrieving hero list message.
I finally managed to play for an hour before going to bed (and the game is awesome), but the way Blizzard handled the whole launch is not impressive.
Not even counting the game breaking bugs with the templar….

I think Bliz could buy double the server and hardware capacity, and that would ensure a fairly trouble free launch. However that would be far more capacity than they’ll ever need again, since concurrent users is the highest it’ll ever be when the game first goes live. So like you said, they know about how many copies they’ll sell, and they have pretty good estimates about how many hours a person will play on average. But since almost everyone plays far more hours the first few days, that always blows the curve.

Seems like they’d rather accept a couple/few days of tech issues and bad press than spend a fortune to double their hosting capacity to a level that they’ll never need again. It’s just economics triumphing over our playing experience.

I sat until 01:30 am after launch trying to log in, but never got past credential auth. I was mad, but I understand that such a massive launch might be difficult. However, the same thing awaited me after I got back from work yesterday. Not until 10:15 pm was I able to log in. My friend got in a little quicker, but was DC’ed after not long, unable to get in again.

That I call a disaster. Right after launch is one thing, but having the same problems 24h later is just bad…

I entered the game after about 12 hours from launch time in EU with my CE edition. Had like 3 or 4 tries to log in but finally went thru. Was able to play without any problems then for about 5-6 hours. Then i took longer break and when i log in again after 3rd-4th try i played 15 minutes and got dc, then again 20 minutes and the game stopped responding, relogged and the same story again and i gave up. Today didnt log in yet…

For me and thousands of GameLaden.com customers it was a disaster. Actually, it is a disaster:
GameLaden says Blizzard told the main supplier of the shop to not send the keys until midnight at monday, and when the keys are sent the shop needs to proceed them or whatsoever, so it’s still not here.

Honestly I am slightly annoyed. Best Buy didn’t ship my CE on time so I decided to spend $65.00 on the normal edition so I wouldn’t miss out on launch night. Unfortunately I couldn’t log in at all launch night and just went to bed. By the time I was able to log in, my CE had come in the mail. Oh well… I haven’t got to play much so far, but what I have played is decently fun.

Well i can tell you im not fine with the always online drm. And thats why i ended up not buying a game i could hardly wait for, for years. Also from what i have seen, it does not warrant a 60$ pricetag. That coped with always online made it a dealbreaker. I have bought diablo2 and the expansion at least 3 times. So yea, they lost me as a customer, but that wont mean much when people will buy anything that wears a brand name. Even if there are better alternatives for a lot cheaper out there.

I wasn’t able to get in until 1:30 AM. Doesn’t seem like that big a deal, but when you’ve been waiting so long for D3 and it’s right in front of your face and then the servers are laughing at you as you cry and pull your hair out, it’s the worst 90 minutes of your life.
And of course servers have gone down a few times since, which is always frustrating, but now that I have tasted Diablo III past the Skeleton king my insanity has waned somewhat and instead of 100% of my focus being on getting back into the action, only about 87% of it is.

people, who can’t login to servers just enrage and write such articles, because they have time.
those who play don’t care, because they are playing ^^
some of my collegues are playing 35h… in a row O.O

All US servers were down between ~11:30PDT – ~17:30PDT. Major outage on launch day. I was able to get in and play for about 1.5 hours after that with no issues, but there were reports of others not being able to get in even after the servers went live (for the second time). A 6 hour outage on the launch day is fairly significant.

I spent a good hour and 15 minutes before being able to log in after the servers went live. And again, slightly less than an hour the evening after when I got home from work. That’s continuous spamming the log in until I got in. While it is annoying not being able to log in, I’m not angry in any way. I was honestly expecting it. People need to take a chill pill. I think the media is exaggerating the problems. After all, sensational news sell.

Basically, there’s no way to prepare for the volume of simultaneous traffic that is economically sound. Have some understanding that any hardware and software have limits. And that expanding the server park to handle a storm that lasts only a couple of days is too expensive to do.

The game is quite unsurprisingly awesome. Even normal difficulty is a bit more difficult than I was expecting. And I can’t wait to get Teleport, hoping that will get me away from the damned Wallers!

Been a long time lurker, so thought I would add my two cents to this issue.

I managed to get online from about 1am on launch night and played for 3 hours, during yesterday morning around 9am was easy to log in with no issues, but last night from about 5pm to 9pm, could not log in at all on the EU servers, kept getting either error 37 (Server busy) or error 75 (Server temporarily offline) managed to finally get a game, after peristant attempts from about 9.30pm last night. So yes, Flux, from a technical point of view, the day of launch was a disaster for Blizzard. My mate who is a keen WoW player, reported that the problems must have been that bad that he couldn’t log in to the World of Warcraft servers either.

The game itself is brilliant, loving every second of playing it, it has to a point exceeded my expectations. But being able to play it when I want in the last day or so has not been so great, but I do expect it to get better as time moves along and I am sure I am going to play this for years to come, just like I did D2.

Its absolutely hilarious… where were these people when D2 came out? I remember only being able to play from 4am – 8am that first week. At any other time the servers were completely unstable and you would lose connection before completing any quests. It was far far worse then this launch was. I actually played for 8 hours yesterday. Considering my expectations, thats pretty remarkable.

It isn’t easy preparing a new environment for millions of users. I’m an IT guy, i know. Blizzard did a fine job getting this thing out there. The media are full of whiny turds who just want to complain about something.

The difference is that you could play D2 single player with no issues (which is what I did). Here there is no option (except after global play was enabled). If you make it online only, it should work. I expected issues launch day, but not this bad (at least down 25% of the time).

I was delayed for an hour and a half, which pissed me off to a degree, but I just got something to eat and took a shit and came back and it was working. Then there was the downtime tonight, again annoying, but it was relatively short.

The articles are hyperbolic for the sake of hits, just like most journalism is. It does feed the “I TOLD YOU SO BLIZZ FANBOIS” trolls pretty easily though, not going to bother trying to dissuade them.

The reasons for online only were fair IMO. Lack of cheating. Less piracy. Anyone who played diablo 1 online knows just how bad cheating was. Diablo 2 did a much better job, but i feel like Blizzard had to dedicate most of its supporting effort to it (rather than improving the game).

As someone who is going to be playing this game for the next couple of years, i just don’t see what the big deal is. I played from 6am – 5pm yesterday. Took a break during the 1 hr outage, and came back to play from 7pm – 9pm. OMG that 1 hr outage is such an outrage! In 3 weeks no one will care.. let alone 3 years.

I never supported always-online. What I’ve experienced since release wasn’t the biggest reason why, but its definitely a factor. I couldn’t play in the early hours of release, so I went to sleep. I woke up and could play for a few hours but suffered repeated popup screens of errors and warping around in game. I’ve had multiple disconnects and three instances of not being able to log in for over an hour. Friends that wanted to play with me or others were unable to do so because aspects of battlenet were not working. People who were online would show as offline. People could not successfully send or receive battletag or realID friend invites even when trying to do so through other blizzard games.
The gameplay itself is outstanding, but the system of getting to it I do consider a failure. I am optimistic that it will be much improved very soon and I’ll be able to accept what they decide to give us. I’d still prefer an always offline char and LAN play, but the game is well made enough to overlook some inconvenience and I think that’s what Blizzard generally banks on.

For the most part Ive played about 8 hours all together and I had an error 37 a couple times at logon where I clicked 2 or 3 times and was then able to get on. Once last night the game dropped on a friend and I decided to just go to bed at that point (12am and working today). I experienced server shut down message once.
Also of note I was able to play on a moving train with a 3G connection that was shaky at best, despite my internet connection dropping to dial-up modem speeds or less, I was only disconnected twice in an hour of this type of play and for the most part it was pretty solid.

And the game itself (aside from server stuff) is awesome and wildly exceeds my expectations so far.

Eh, some trouble getting in and some down time yesterday but I’m an adult so I think it was reasonable. Given a choice between currents levels of frustration and waiting longer, I’m good with this. It really is a magnificent game. Loved killing my old friend The Butcher again after all these years.

And as for the media, well, we know their prioritsee: if it bleeds, it leads.

I would not say the launch was a disaster, but I’m in the US where things went pretty smooth. People in EU probably have a different opinion though. At any rate, IMO Blizzard should have had servers up in EU for beta, but didn’t. Blizzard is too darn big not to have had servers up and tested before launch.

I did not try to login for the midnight launch. I did pre-install my digital copy on Monday evening when this was possible.

Tuesday morning I woke up at 6:00 went to work and was home at 17:00. I read on the forums the article from Flux and Elly playing together and was really looking forward to playing some after the years of waiting. At 19:30 finished reading my son his bedtime story and switched on the PC to finally play this game a bit. After several different error codes I was able to reach the character creation screen and made a new character to start.

I could not start nor join any game and got another error code. I than read on the forum that there was an emergenc patch and ETA for servers to be back up was 1 hour. I continued trying to log on every 10 minutes or so. Then read another message on the forum that the servers are estimated to be down for another 2,5 hours.

So how do I feel? Frustrated! I waited a long time for this game, I tried loggin in for the first time almost 20 hours after launch, and even though I spent 2 hours on trying to log in, the furthest I got to playing was a character login screen. Even the open beta was better than this, as there at least I could play at times. It is very disappointing so far that the open beta offered a better expereince to me than the final game. I hope I am able to play a bit tonight. I have a busy job, family and friends and usually have 2 evenings on which I play games for a few hours, not being able to play when I have time is therefore very frustrating and poor customer service.

Not sure about other regions but the server for the Americas has been awful and exactly as bad as those articles state. When midnight hit, I was unable to login until close to 2AM and this was with repeated effort. A couple times I got to the character creation screen tried over and over and failed at that point too. Then this afternoon they take it down for a couple of hours for emergency maintenance and things seem okay. Well the evening hits and they have to take it down for 3-4 more hours for more maintenance. The game itself is mindblowing, but the launch was indeed an EPIC fail.

My experience was very frustrating as well: I coudn’t connect to EU servers at midnight (that was kinda expected), at 1 AM (the frustration began) and in the end I logged in at 2 AM. I played a couple of hour and went to bed.
Yesterday was a complete disaster: I wasn’t able to play from 6 PM to 11 PM, and many others with me. The italian official forum was flooded with insults and threads about the server fail and only one blue answered with “the servers are doing fine!”… today they removed all the spam/insults/trolling messages from the official forum, but it still was a complete disaster.

The fact that you were able to log in (while thousands of others couldn’t) doesn’t make my words fake. Trust me, I have no interest in bashing the game for no reason. The technical support in Italy was also “extremely lacking” and unprepared, to say the least.
It’s fair if you can’t play at midnight (as THEY announced, btw) but when you can’t connect FOR HOURS the day after release, even for a single player session, well… that isn’t very ok.
PS: don’t worry about my exercises: I’m pretty sure that I’m fitter and healthier than you! 😉

I was having just as many problems as the next person, but I was expecting them for the first day or so. I realized that it would quickly be fixed and most likely will not plague the game for the rest of its life. Well, until the first expansion that is.

I really had no major issues, installed, logged on around 8:30PM EST last night, got in about 1.5 hours, logged off, then went back on around 11PM, then got the error 37, followed by 3003 and 75, then note came up stating realm down. With these types of launches, with the shear number of gamers playing, everyone should expect some downtime. The beta helped with some kinks, but a limited beta does not even come close to equaling the first day of release( which is why I chose to work for first few days, rather than take time off). People who get upset need to chill out, and just remember that once the initial influx of new gamers playing this goes down, that Blizzard will be able to adjust the servers, add more if needed and make things more smooth. Console games have ruined expectations for game releases as they usually require no down time, with D3, everyone knew it was online only, so should have expected some issues… with that said, Hope everyone is able to get on and play soon, game is great so far…. and I’m only at lvl 8 with my wizard…

Only now in EU icould somewhat login and actually play, at midnight and second day it was almost impossible before the patch they released so yeah the media are saying the truth.. its a disaster launch for sure for this kind of important game for blizzard.

LMFAO like I said a little while back, launch day will be a replica of open beta!! boy am I glad I’m waiting for my CE to arrive from overseas, instead of wasting 80 bucks on a crappy digital copy that I wouldn’t be able to play for days, until Blizzard pulled their thumbs outta their useless asses and did something right for a change.

just wait, only days away from creating my very first char….and then Bashiok will get a real load of me.

I thought the launch went better than expected. Yeah, I spent an hour trying to get on at midnight PDT, but then I played for nearly 11 hours without any issue what-so-ever. I even got to play some more that evening between the maintenance downtimes.

I can see how many people think it was a disaster though. If I had tried to get on a midnight and had gotten frustrated and went to sleep and then woke up 10 hours later only to find that I still couldn’t get on I’d be pretty annoyed. Then to top it off when I finally got the chance to get on at 3:30 PDT another issue pops up 4 hours later right when I’m getting into the game! Yeah. That would be a $^%&# day.

Problem #1 – Diablo3 as it sits on your hard disk is not the product that we payed for. Because D3 is an online-only game, it is actually a service, and that service didn’t work. And now Blizzard must realize that anytime that there are login/server problems, their service isn’t working, and I hope they learn very quickly that they must address is as if it were WoW, even though there is no subscription per-se for D3.

Problem #2 – During all of this, the blue posts/support (at least on the EU site) was pitiful if not non-existant. In the aftermath of all of this, I hope Blizzard makes a strong statement about the disappointment of what transpired, and I hope they are humble about it.

Blizzard should be proud of launching with this kind of multi million numbers and let people play within the first 24 hours On … One server structure. Something that no one ever did before on such a single server cluster.

It took me 22 hours to be able to log on for the first time. But this is probably because I had a normal work day and thus could only play when most ppl are online. That Blizzard didn’t make a queue system is a big fuck-up. Now they basically had ppl hammering the servers with login requests.

It amazes me how much people are ready and willing to jump down Blizzard’s throat and stab them in the back after harping about the grandeur of this game while anticipating its release. But I guess that is the nature of the press (having to sensationalize everything) and many fans (fickle and rabid for new gameplay). These launch day problems should’ve been expected by anyone with even a drop of knowledge about online video games. I’d say the only thing that made this anything but an ordinary launch was the horrid bug that makes people lose a lot of their achievements. This is nothing compared to the SW:TOR and RIFT launches. Not quite as smooth as Blizzard’s past couple launches, but they were dealing with new server infrastructure. Just be glad they are as diligent about fixing problems asap as they are…

I was able to play from about an hour after launch till I went to bed at around 5AM. Then the next day when I managed to play until mid Act 2 the game keeps on crashing at exactly the same point everytime again. No help yet on the battle.net forums… Can’t play the game further anymore. Not happy

I agree with the previously mentioned post about how D3 is now a service, since the hard copy we obtain are no longer playable without Blizzard keeping their servers up. Its like paying for a cell phone plan. If the cell phone towers are down, you will bet people will call up their cell phone companies to complain.

You cannot use the reason “oh, but people knew what they were buying from the getgo”. People did know what they were buying, but they also assumed that the service would work as promised.

I am in the middle on this one. On one hand, I did manage to play for 3 hours between 7-10pm EST. Took a quick break and came back around 11pm and the servers were down. Tired and a bit annoyed, I watched the basketball games on TV to pass the time. But when that was over, I still could not get on. So I went to the options screen and started to play around, thats when I got the idea of hoping onto the ASIA server. So My friends and I did that and managed to play for another 3 hours before heading to bed.

So I was annoyed that I had to play the same contents twice, but at least I get to play D3. I feel bad for the players that can’t play at all. And as for the critics, just remember it is their job to criticize. Who is going to read their review if everything is always rosy?

I got to play for 30 minutes last night. No problems logging in. Was at 7:30PDT.

My only problem was my boneheadedness. I accidentally reinstalled beta. Thought I had deleted it and wasn’t paying attention as I installed while making dinner.

There is no doubt tho that the login servers being a bottleneck is a bad thing. I realize the cost would be high to temporarily have a larger structure. I don’t see why they couldn’t have done it though. They could have even rented the extra servers temporarily from a company like amazon. I doubt the cost would have been that great and Amazon could have redeployed them later on. Avoiding bad press would have been worth the money.

I get a kick out of how so many people think they know how all this works.

Do you know how the Ethernet standard works? For most people, probably not. While I won’t define all its intricacies, I can tell you that it was never designed for all the things we do with the internet. Streaming video? Audio? Online games? If you know the way Ethernet and TCP/IP are actually designed to work, you’d know that none of the things we do with the internet are guaranteed to work the way we expect. When it comes to TCP/IP, you’re not even guaranteed to ever communicate over the media (media as in transmission method, not media as in CNN).

With just that alone, it’s a small wonder that any of our online games work as well as they do. Add on top of that the server demands, and you have a recipe for “WTF!?”

Sure, Blizz could have spent millions more on more servers – servers that after launch week would have been all but useless space when all these concurrent connections normalize and aren’t an issue anymore. Then what? Would that maybe make then charge more for their games next time around? Or maybe they’d just start charging a subscription for all their games, MMO or not.

I’m just as frustrated as everyone else. Maybe even more so; as of last night I have yet to play a single minute of the game. See, I have an 8-5 job, M-F. When I get home, I have my wife, home, dog and unborn child to tend to. So by the time I got a chance to try to play last night (I wasn’t going to stay up past midnight launch just to play and be wrecked for work the next day), the servers were down. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I’m not even very fond of the always-on DRM, but I understand it. Even ignoring DRM for the sake of piracy, the fact that there’s a RMAH is cause enough to have always-on. Can you imagine the absolute travesty that would happen if people were able to hack items and sell them on the RMAH?

But my frustration doesn’t make me lose sight of the technological issues that, despite what many users here seem to think, are not a long-gone problem. We’ve become spoiled to our internet connections always being there, but it takes more than wishful thinking and throwing money at it to make it happen. It all comes down to physics and what the technology can actually do.

It’s non of your business, really, but you have no idea what my wife and I had to go through to have a baby. The fact that after all I posted you decided to pull that out of it affirms how juvenile you are.

But, you know, I guess that’s my fault. We’re all soulless robots here anyway, aren’t we? I should have never posted anything here that made me out to be an adult human. Lesson learned.

For a Multi-Player Online game. I though the Diablo 3 launch has gone well so far. This is not a simple RPG anymore. THERE IS NO SINGLE PLAYER GAMEPLAY MODE!!! Live with it!! There is a limited access online mode, but you can open up your restricted online game at any time. I always hated the two sets of characters setup of Diablo 2 anyway. And the shared stash itself is worth the online restriction!!

Aside from the downtime for maintenance, I’ve been fairly fortunate. Got in after an hour of attempts on release night and got to play yesterday too. Much like the beta sigil controversy, this will blow over in a few days. The servers are up now and logging in is easy. A day of issues doesn’t qualify as a disaster for me, though a day of waiting to play a game you’ve been waiting 6 years for, I can understand the ire.

I was able to log into the EU server no problem too.
You are forgetting one thing: The NA server was down for hours at a time repeatedly.
I got to “practice” since characters are not transferable (right?) from server to server.

Since a single player game is hosted on their server (some nasty lag from Canada to EU server) it is very irritating.
To prevent spoofing of items for real money (coming soon!) it is the only way they can prevent the “license to make money”.

With only an hours play: I had a lag death, it is like old times.
Hope when the NA servers get their act together the ping time is short, teleporting monsters and delayed item pickups is so last decade.

If this was any other company and/or game they would be crucified out of hand so there is some legitimate complaints. Plus I pimped for the collectors edition so expectations were getting a bit high…

I remember the Dark Maelstrom that was the original World of Warcraft launch. Server problems didn’t just kick you off for hours but for days, and it went on for months. So bad that back then Blizzard actually credited my account (without being asked) and millions of others over a month’s worth of paid game time.

From what I’ve seen so far of Diablo III the worst of the server glitches happened yesterday and by and large the servers were up for the majority of the day. I got in a solid six hours of gametime both before and after work. Yeah, there are problems, but who seriously wasn’t expecting launch day troubles?

The number of reported errors and problems so far today are down drastically from yesterday. We’ve still got the evening after-work hours to get through, but if the weekend comes and goes without too much trouble then I’ll call this Launch a success.

I’m sure we’ll see scores on Metacritic and other sites go up once the people who enjoy the game finish the first Difficulty play-through and can tear themselves away from it long enough to write a real review.

I think a drunk monkey in a comatose could have guessed this was going to happen. Problem is these are businesses that make money of reviewing games and those people have jobs to do. What happens in business if you can’t do your job? You pass the buck. Thus the ugly press. Technical issues? Huh, was a technical issue? 🙄

Online being stupid is just one opinion among many. I for one don’t think it’s stupid. There are pro’s and con’s, but it’s not stupid. If two years from now you still don’t see any duped items, less rollbacks etc, people will praise the decision. Believe it or not, Diablo wasn’t designed for launch day. I’d much rather have problems the first week, and better gameplay the next ten years, than zero launch issues but poorer gameplay.

Got home from work and tried to get on around 6:20 pm EST. Servers were down for maintenance, but came back online 10 minutes later just as their announcement had planned. Played from about 6:30 to 11pm with no issues. Just the fact that they met the one repair deadline I encountered was enough to satisfy me. They’ve got it covered.

This is the nature of a server based game. It was obvious this was going to occur with such a popular game. Anyone that said otherwise was kidding themselves. That said even Valves steam cloud servers go down without warning from time to time and that is a pretty established service.

What I cannot believe is how this game came shipped with so many installation issues and a few game breaking bugs. There was so much beta testing done that it’s nuts to think such bugs slipped by the testers. That said I have had zero technical issues with the game personally.

The game itself is great.
The Battle.Net servers and amount of downtime is horrible.
Blizzard should have been prepared for this. This isn’t their first online game. If any company should’ve been prepared, it’s Blizzard.

I’ve actually been incredibly lucky. I played yesterday for an hour before work, got in on my first try, then the server was down almost all day, but I was at work anyway, so it didn’t matter.

After work, my husband and I played for about 4 hours, with absolutely no issues at all. He logged off to go to bed, and I was going to play for another hour or so, but the server crashed, so I went ahead and went to bed.

This morning, I logged in and played for about 30 minutes again before work.

So pretty much any time I had time to play, the servers were up and working perfectly. Thank you Blizzard. I have tomorrow and Friday off work, and I cross my fingers they have most of the bugs worked out by then.

I’m a supporter of Blizzard, generally. My largest frustration has been that this has not been a good launch from a consumer point of view. It’s not a good thing when you have a guild chatter with each other and say things like…”is the server going to be up at some point today?”

US servers had quite a few problems yesterday. Yes, it’s a launch. Yes, we can be patient and let it iron itself out. But we shouldn’t have to be. We shouldn’t be OK with the situation. Why should it be ok that a launch was this fubared?

That’s my frustration is that there is some justifications going on boards that this should be ok. No, a launch can have hiccups and bumps in the road, but this has by far been one of the worst launches I’ve seen in an online platform in years, and I’ve seen quite a few from various publishers.

The issues for me was the fact that US servers were down for extended periods. I had the day off work, and played for about an hour in the mid morning, then servers went down for at least 3 hours. I left home and came back a few hours later to be able to play a whopping 10 minutes before another extended shut down. I finally went to bed with very little play time under my belt. With that, it really wasn’t unexpected. Once the logins settle down and the server structure is optimized, I predict we will see very little issue with downtime. With a great majority of those that preordered trying to get in immediately, you should expect some server hiccups. I have confidence that Blizz will get it figured out and have things running smooth in the next day or two.

I would be much more unhappy if the game sucked. 😀 So far I’m having a lot of fun playing (when they allow me to).

The only thing in the article I’d disagree with is the amount of time it took to get in game launch night. Of the about 30 people that I know that tried to log in feverishly from 12:01 am to 1:00 am, only about 2-3 got in game. Another 1-2 got in game but got hung at the character creation screen and couldn’t play. I stopped trying at about 1:05 am and waited until 2:00 am to get in. Could have been better, could have been worse. The game is fun and that’s what really matters to me.

Here’s what I did and have been as happy as I could possibly expect given a launch of this size:

1) I did NOT try to get on at midnight PST (3 AM local). I went to sleep at 9 PM the night before, woke up at 5 AM, was able to get on without issue and played for 3 hrs before work.
2) I did NOT take day 1 of the game off, I expected there to be issues. There were. They fixed them. By the time I got home from work and ate dinner, I was able to get on and play all evening. I signed off, the server went down shortly after. I might play a bit tonight, and if the server is down, oh well, I won’t.

Given the size of this release, if anyone expected any more than what we got, that person was stupid.

9:00pm previous day – go to bed, intending to wake up around 4am to get a few hours in before work
2:30am – wake up, can’t get back to sleep, decide to roll with it and play a while
2:30-3:30am – repeatedly spam login. At no time do I succeed in connecting. Give up and go back to sleep
7:00am-9:30am – wake up, check in at work, realize my boss isn’t around and there isn’t much to do, take personal day after all.
9:30am-11:30am – Play Diablo! Get DCed, try to log back in for a bit and can’t.
11:30am-1:pm – Go for a run, grab some lunch, try to log back in. Can’t connect.
2:20pn – Finally get logged back in. Servers shut down in 10 minutes.
3:45pm – Get logged in again. Servers come down in 10 minutes.
9pm – Blah blah blah dinner, blah blah blah put kid to bet, blah blah blah chores, OK we’re back. Log in
9-10:30pm – Play Diablo! Get DCed, can’t log back in, take the hint and go to bed.

So all told, I got in about 3.5 total hours of playtime between go-live and 11:00pm. The most disturbing aspect is that of my play sessions, not a single one of them ended by my own choosing. Queues being full is one thing, but if I can’t even stay in once I’m past that barrier, that’s a pretty big deal.

Having said that, I totally understand why this happened and it’s my own stupid fault for believing that somehow we’d have 100% uptime with every single user on at once. I’m not outraged; it happens, and today has been perfectly smooth. However, I think anybody that had a completely smooth experience is a very lucky minority, and would love to see a poll to determine that.

People are overreacting like crazy. The “12am” launch was more like a 1:30 launch with some people able to play while others were locked out, but this is exactly what Blizzard said would happen when the servers inevitably got busy. This is not a problem with the servers, it’s the problem of telling everyone the can log in at exactly 12am and then that being true. It would be better if they actually opened the servers at 11pm so that people flowed in more naturally with a big but less significant spike at 12am.

I was able to play from 1:30 PST to 5AM PST without a problem. I slept and went to work and was told that there was a lot of downtime from about 10am to 4pm, but I missed that. I came home and logged in for a while before having downtime from about 10pm to 11:30pm, but then was able to play fine until 2am with only a 2 minute disconnect about 1:30am.

All in all, problems that were expected and that should be gone in a few days. Some people have gotten a lot of playtime, and I myself have gotten over 7 hours in the first 26 hours after launch, which is a lot considering I work 8 hour days. Not a great launch, but quite tolerable.

I think if there is a poll, it should have 2 questions to make it more useful. One could be something like “How many hours during the first 24 hours did you play?” and the second could be something like “How many hours would you have played during that time if the servers had been up and ready for you?” Then you can figure out the % of time the servers were available for every voter.

I really enjoy the game but installing it was already a nightmare. I finally choose to download the game(I have the DVD) to avoid downloading the update for the installations. Everything took me 6 hours.
Today, with the new update, it took me 7 – 8 attempts before I was finally able to play the game.
I’ve never had so much problems since the DOS era.

That animation with hamsters puts Blizzard in too good of light. Blizzard is an equal opportunity animal exploiter, as they only implement diabetic 3-legged hamsters with a heart condition in their servers.

While it does feel terrible if you’re the one getting all the 37s and such, I think those people that feel that way just hop on the message boards to complain (and there was a lot of that). And non gamer journalist looking for a story, see the boards flooded with pissed off people and see an easy story to sensationalize.

Just seems like people are over reacting to me. As many people have mentioned I’m sure, when you have +1million server connection attempts at EXACTLY the same time, server problems are to be expected. I dont think having more servers changes that fact. Personally, I only experienced minor problems when i tried to log on a hour after the launch (Americas). I fully expected not to be able to play that night due to inevitable server issues. Blizzard gave us the heads up about it, and if people use their heads and actually think about the sheer volume of players trying to log on at once, you have to expect issues. We have waited 12 years guys, is a few days of intermitted problems really that bad? Get a grip. If you took the time off work for the launch, thats the risk you take. Why not take the day off a couple of days later to guarantee a good session? Blizzard never said there would not be problems. Reality… deal with it.

I tried to login for about 1,5 hours. NO FUN. Playing the game was smoother than in beta (FUN) and i didnt logout until servers went down.

And I guess, since the EU servers started a couple of hours earlier, many of the Americans tried to play on the EU server. So I guess, quite alot of people. less people might have tried to login into the americas servers from EU.

Only problems I’ve had loggin in were when the client had a message about server maintenance, warning of login difficulty, etc so far. I’ve been dropped a few times and experienced some lag issues, but it’s been more stable than Diablo II ever was. Even playing D2 a few months ago (pre-D3 beta time) lag and logging into games was terrible. Only complaint is when there IS a message in the game client about server maintenance, there is no ETA for it being fixed. That would be nice just so I knew if I should sit at the comp and wait or go do something else.

Overall, enjoying it so far. On Act 2 with a barbarian. Doesn’t seem to have that addiction factor that d2 did for me though. Probably a good thing as I’m pretty busy and don’t have time to be anything but casual right now.